So… this week you actually get to decide the future of online privacy. Seriously!

As you read this, the Senate is debating their version of CISPA: the “Cybersecurity Act of 2012”. There will be debate and amendments, but a vote can come any day.

CISPA–which already passed the House–was awful. Government got potential access to all your personal data with no restrictions on what they could do with it. But the Senate bill has some strong privacy protections… for now.

The problem is, a group of anti-privacy Senators and the NSA are pushing amendments to remove these protections and bring the Senate bill closer to CISPA. Our friends in the Senate say that phone lines have been dangerously quiet: not enough constituents are calling in support of privacy.

The bill is in the final stages and could easily become law; we need to keep those privacy protections in it. Al Franken and Rand Paul are also supporting a pro-privacy amendment that needs our support.

Your call could actually tip the scales. Thanks to an unrelated battle (mostly along party lines) over whether or not government should regulate the systems securing basic infrastructure like power grids, the final vote could be very close. If we can convince just a handful of Senators to stand up for our rights to privacy, we can significantly improve the bill or block it entirely.

This year, grassroots movements defeated SOPA in the US and ACTA in Europe. Wouldn’t it be amazing if this latest bad-idea bill also went down in flames (or at least, got significantly improved)? Well, you’ve gotta work a little bit to make it happen :)